@coded_artist these are not from silent hill 1. maybe magazine photos? but they don't appear anywhere in the game, not a chance in hell.

though, the CG cutscene artist for sh1 was nuts. he worked overtime because he personally wanted the CGI in the game and that's the only way it was going to happen. then he became the director of the series.

and yes, ONE DUDE DID ALL OF THEM.

youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtP

@beardalaxy I HAVE BEEN BAMBOOZLED!

Still looks better than the "current year" version.

The pics appear to be from the upcoming remake...
Maybe I wasn't bamboozled, but simply misunderstood the meme makers intent. :thinking_edge:

@coded_artist there is no upcoming remake of sh1. just sh2. although i wish it was for sh1, that would have been much better. with the lower poly graphics and general ps1-era jank they could have certainly done more to it without having people be so critical. i'd certainly be cooler with an evil-within-style remake of sh1 than i am of sh2.

a big problem with the cutscenes in the sh2 remake is that they are rendered in realtime and those realtime graphics aren't very good. you can see the aliasing from the hair all over the place and the rendering pipeline for most unreal engine games is super soft and kind of bland.

people always used to say that realtime rendering will age better than prerendered scenes will, since the prerendered ones have compression artifacts and especially back in the day were locked to lower resolutions that couldn't be upscaled like the actual game's graphics could be. however, the graphics were also more simple back then and it leads to them looking better at higher resolutions than whatever the hell this is in HD. you can't exactly just throw more pixels at it in this case. i would heavily prefer some compression artifacts than artifacts from antialiasing and such.

also in case you didn't know, that isn't the original photo of angela at the bottom there. it's been edited to exacerbate how round her face looks now. this is a better comparison using the real photo from the remake on the left and the original CGI on the right.

@coded_artist the original, despite obviously being pre-rendered, also has so much more mood to it in the scene. Unreal Engine tends to just kind of look flat and that takes away from how surreal Silent Hill is. Watching all of the trailers, it really does seem like the mood has been stripped and I'm just watching some random Unreal project with somewhat familiar locations and characters.

@beardalaxy I despise Unreal Engine, but only because I actually used it, and have a few points of reference, as I also have some experience using Unity, Unigine, and Godot.

Still I will defend it, it's a powerful tool, if somewhat mangled and difficult to work with.

The real issue isn't the engine, it's the FX artists.
They've grown lazy (or they're a diversity hire), or the company is trying to cut corners.

Unreal is capable of much more, but the devs aren't putting in the effort because things look good enough out of the box.
Previously it wasn't so, you HAD TO put in the effort, now that you don't have to, many don't.

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@coded_artist Yeah of course Unreal is a super powerful engine that can do some great things. Look at Ghostrunner for example, game looks fucking fantastic (though it still has the stutter issue unfortunately). The problem is that it's so easy to make realistic graphics with Unreal that it's what most studios just default to.

Realistic graphics in gaming is an interesting subject, because we have all these techniques and methods to make things look more realistic than ever now but it ends up looking worse than the games that were shooting for realism back in 2010. I think those older games still had some style and depth to them. A lot of the modern techniques for things also just tend to kind of look bad. Temporal anti-aliasing sucks. I know it's much more performant, but MSAA eats it alive in terms of visual clarity. Screen space reflections are also usually total ass unless the game has a fixed camera perspective. How am I supposed to get immersed in your realistic graphics if the reflection on the water and in windows is all fucked up? Then you have raytracing but it's noisy and has artifacts of its own that I'm not a huge fan of. I much prefer baked lighting when possible, but that's a lot harder to do when you're making an open world game which seems to be all the rage.

SH2 Remake would benefit a lot from ditching modern rendering techniques and opting for older ones with more style. It would help set the game apart.

Actually, I think one of the best looking games that has come out in recent memory has been the Metroid Prime remaster. This shit is running on a Switch and looks better than 99% of everything else out there. It's so moody.

@beardalaxy > Temporal anti-aliasing sucks.
> Screen space reflections are also usually total ass

Preach!

Setting up reflection probes is tedious, just turn on the raytracing toggle, and let the default render pipeline handle it, that's what I mean by lazy FX artists.

Compare current year trash to over worked Chinese devs (pic related)

It's a seamless open world, where you can see VERY distant landmarks, and it runs on a phone.

This is Genshin, an older version (they recently added planet curvature to the world, so not all these landmarks visible).

There's a lot of LOD, and imposters too, various techniques that are not (yet) fully automated.
(Automatic LODs exist, but they look like trash)

It's all about the effort.
It's the diversity and HR hags that are at fault for these failures in my opinion.

Need more autists in game dev.

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